Archive for March, 2013

East Sussex Open 2013

Thursday, March 14th, 2013

ESO-2013-300x200Together with Sanna Moore, Curator at the Towner and artist Alessandro Raho I was a selector for this year’s East Sussex Open. Photo (right) by Alison Bettles shows the exhibition install.

 

http://www.townereastbourne.org.uk/exhibition/east-sussex-open-2013/

The exhibition opened on Friday 8 March comprising 38 artists from East Sussex, including, for the first time this year, artists from Brighton and Hove.

The Mirrors of Gigantic Shadows

Thursday, March 14th, 2013

6 – 8 pm Wednesday 27 February 2013, Towner, Eastbourne

A talk and discussion around the Kelly Richardson exhibition ‘Legion’ for the Blue Monkey Network at the Towner. In a conversation at the opening of ‘Legion’ Kelly Richardson and I talked about how art can sometimes seem prophetic and how artists pick up on what is in the air and reconfigure it in their work so that the work appears to predict what happens in the world. It reminded me of the claim by the English Romantic poet Shelley, at the end of his Defence of Poetry, that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ and Kelly Richardson thought this appropriate. Reading through Shelley’s essay with Richardson’s work in mind I was struck by his use of language particularly in this phrase: “the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present. For the evening I propose spending some time with Kelly Richardson’s work and discussing live what it actually does and then thinking about what it might imply, if anything, for the Earth’s accelerating environmental crisis.